If you do not understand people, you cannot function properly as a leader. You can be a great manager – managing tasks, but accept the fact that if you are not a people person, don’t try to ‘fake it until you make it!’ It does not work. Don’t even try.

What amazes me is, as baby boomers are increasingly leaving the workforce, businesses, especially large corporates are blissfully carrying on like it was 1964!

You cannot treat the new workforce – the millennials and iGen – the same way. Remember, many are majorly cheesed off with the fact that the baby boomers have their nicely paid off house in the ‘burbs, and a fat superannuation scheme allowing them to be S.K.I.’s (Spending Kid’s Inheritance). They struggle to get into the housing market but realise that they have one lovely little negotiation trick up their sleeves. Fewer people are coming into the workplace than leaving it so they can be more demanding, more challenging, and you can easily lose them to a competitor.

The short and sweet of it: if you are an employer and struggling to find ‘good staff’, you have to change your culture. How do I do this you ask?

It does not mean bringing in a ‘Change Management Consultant’ or buying books from Simon Pillock or Richard Allbran and having them splattered around your offices. You don’t need Mission and Culture Statements popped on the office walls that your team may look at and smirk – ‘as if that was true here’. And whatever you do, don’t go and buy a pool table and stick it in the middle of the offices. Do you honestly think that that will motivate your team? No.

The answer?

Well, if the penny is dropping and the harsh realisation that the old mushroom technique does not work (keep the employees in the dark and feed ‘em sh**) you must change the way you think!
Changing the way you think about your team, will change how you feel, which will change what you do, then change the results. The results being an engaged, motivated, happy, team putting in bucket loads of discretionary effort.

People want to be listened to. Really listened to. They despise being micromanaged. They want to be trusted. They want to be educated. They want to be appreciated and feel that their opinions count. They crave and long to give discretionary effort, but poor management often kills it. They want to be happy at work! Happy team, happy management, happy bottom line profit.
They also want to be up to date. Working with seven-year-old computers which are dinosaurs is depressing! Let them select and buy the latest and greatest!

When Gallup state that 3 out of 4 employees are disengaged at work, that is a sobering statistic. Fortunately, we can fix it. That is what I do. (Plus a lot more!)